Comcast unveiled a new Olympics viewing experience today that blurs the lines between web, live TV, mobile apps, and streaming media. Plus, it intrudes into the smart voice-activated home hub space that Amazon Alexa and Google Home thought they owned.

"This will be the most mobile, most personalized, most customizable Olympics ever," Comcast chief product officer Chris Satchell told me last week at CES in Las Vegas. "We’ve focused on how we tailor the Olympics watching experience to you ... it's a lean-back experience, but also a lean forward experience."

Some of Comcast's virtual channels for the 2018 Winter Olympics.Comcast

The key: massive customization.

Think YouTube meets Netflix meets good-old-fashioned live TV.

This could just solve the biggest problem sports lovers have with the Olympics: "rampant FOMO," as Satchell styled it. The fear-of-missing-out challenge is obvious: with over 2,400 hours of programming from basically all the sports ... what should you watch? Whatever you choose, you're missing out on something good.

Comcast is solving that with dozens of virtual channels.

You can, of course, just watch your favorite sports. And you can go back in time to watch them "live," after the fact, even if you join in progress. But there are also virtual channels for essentially on-demand highlight reels like the funniest fails, the most amazing moments, the biggest comebacks, trending athletes, the absolutely must-see moments.

The key is Comcast's massive investments in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and big data, with a goal of delivering the right entertainment -- and information -- to you at the right time.

Which is, of course, whenever you want it.

As in all things AI, scale helps. The company has 18 million X1 voice remotes in homes, which people use 500 million times a month, and customers hit the Xfinity home screen a billion times each month. (There will be 1,500 Olympic specific voice commands available as well.)

A sample daily summary of activity in XfinityComcast

That's taught Comcast a lot about what people want, and how to access it.

But Comcast also employs artificial intelligence on the backend to tag, categorize, and sort hundreds of hours of high-def (and 4K) video content to automatically find the best moments, the greatest highlights, and the most interesting footage.

That's how Xfinity can in almost-real-time display virtual channels.

And the result feels like the future.

Ultimately, there will be little difference between the web, TV, streaming media like Netflix, or even mobile apps. The differences just lie in the size of the screens and the types of experiences that each modality and device set prioritizes.

Everything, of course, is also available on mobile. And by everything, Comcast means everything.

"By creating one go-to destination for all Olympics coverage across devices on Xfinity Stream, all Xfinity TV customers can access every moment of every event on their favorite devices, at home or anywhere in the country,” Comcast EVP for Xfinity Matt Strauss said in a release.

Interestingly, Comcast has also enabled voice control of smart home appliances via Xfinity.

It's not something I had expected from an entertainment company, but it makes sense. The TV is often a central focus point in a home, and if you can talk to it, it's easy to control. Also, it can visually show you in great clarity what you're doing, thanks to its large screen.

It's not Comcast's first priority -- "We focus voice on the domains we care about," Satchell told me -- but it is something that the company thinks about, and likely increasingly over the next few years as the smart home market continues to heat up.

"We’re going to democratize automation," he added.

Back in the company's familiar home turf of entertainment, experiences like these will likely help Comcast hold the line against cord-cutting, at least for some time. In the long run, of course, it's likely that dedicated hardware will not be needed to deliver this kind of entertainment experience.

That's something the company has already learned from its mobile apps.

I forecast and analyze trends affecting the mobile ecosystem. I've been a journalist, analyst, and corporate executive, and have chronicled the rise of the mobile economy. I built the VB Insight research team at VentureBeat and managed teams creating software for partners li...